Something
by De-lay-ney
Summary: Klaus was dead. They were free. It was over. The fact was so surreal it took a moment for it to sink in.


**This is something I began a few months ago but didn't really add onto. I don't know if it will turn into anything. Let me know if you want me to continue but don't expect me to be quick on writing the next chapters. Hope you enjoy it anyway. **

_If you were here beside me instead of in New York  
If the curve of you was curved on me  
I'd tell you that I loved you before I ever knew you  
'Cause I loved the simple thought of you  
If our hearts are never broken and there's no joy in the mending  
There's so much this hurt can teach us both  
There's distance and there's silence, your words have never left me  
They're the prayer that I say every day  
_

She didn't want to look at the body. She had snapped her head away when she saw the designated skin embroiled with hardened veins over his colourless face. She didn't want to look at his face either.

Klaus was dead. They were free. It was over.

The fact was so surreal it took a moment for it to sink in.

And everyone had expected her to sigh in relief, cry in joy, scream in happiness. But to her, those words, joy, relief, happiness; did not exist in her vocabulary and they still don't. What had happened in the past year was already scripted into her brain and it'll never leave her memory. Not even if she's compelled.

She doesn't even want to be compelled. Somehow, if she is compelled it'll make it worse, it'll make her feel empty and dead and broken and she won't know why, because you can forget the memory but you can't forget the grief. She should at least have a reason to be distraught, and wearied away. She needs a reason to tell people why she doesn't want to get up in the morning and why her eye always look red and puffy like she's been crying.

Maybe because she has.

She can't forget the vampires, the lies, the constant worrying of loosing her life, of her friends lives. To forget the loss, the death, the blood. For a moment there, she wanted to slit her throat, just so she could let her family live in piece without her being a burden. But she knew if she did that Klaus would slaughter them anyway.

It's not like they survived it.

Her life was a living hell and when his ugly body had dropped by her feet. She felt revolted by the fact that she had to even look at him, feel his lifeless body drop onto her toes; she felt disguised that ever in her life she would have to witness the death, the drying, the hardening of a vampire and its corpse.

And she needed to leave those feelings. She needed to erase it all. This town, mystic falls was a place she had grown to love, it was grooved in her heart. It held her happy childhood, it held a time where her biggest worry was her relationship with matt.

But sooner than later that beautiful time had vanished and was slowly replaced by agonizing pain. It was turned into a place she never wanted to think about, it became a cemetery of loved ones. It has become the town of perpetual grief.

She doesn't want it to ever enter her mind again. But wanting it not to doesn't stop the thought to flicker every now and then.

That's why she, selfishly and carelessly, fled the remaining people she loves more than she can handle. Because it was all too much, it all still is. She packed her bag with the essentials, money, and passport but left everything else, every memory, and every photo, even her dear diary.

It must've have been as if she never left at all. Her room would have looked just the same; her past self (her normal happy self) would have stayed there like a ghost, roaming the halls, wishing she could come back to life again.

It would've been that way if Jeremy and Jenna and Alaric and her mother and her father (both adoptive and biological) were still alive. But no, they're all dead.

You can't blame her for leaving can you? But she can blame herself.

Caroline.

Bonnie.

Matt.

Tyler.

Even Stefan.

They'll be okay now, that's one thing that puts her to ease, whether she's with them or not, there safe now. They can go on with their lives and _be happy_.

But when she thinks of them she has to think of one more person.

That one more person shatters her heart a little more just at the sound of his name.

Damon.

She hastily wipes the tears from her glossy eyes. As long as she's here, in New York and he's there in Mystic Falls it doesn't do any good for either of them, not until they move on.

And Elena doubts she ever will.

She doesn't want to think about it. She doesn't want to feel the inhumane ache it brings to her fragile, withered body. Broken. She's so broken. You can't repair yourself from what she's gone through, you can never recover.

You can never put the pieces back together. Maybe just maybe, if someone else tried to it would at least make a difference. Maybe. Especially if they knew where the pieces would fit.

But maybe isn't good enough or her. Like she isn't good enough for fate.

Elena pulls the pillow closer to her body, ignoring the fact that half of it is damp from her tears. Tomorrow will be a new day. Tomorrow will be better.

But she knows that it's lie after you've lied to yourself more times than you could count.

She lays there in the devastating silence, in the compressing darkness until somehow she drifts into the blissful reverie of sleep.

**In her unconscious state of dream**

Elena lays soundlessly asleep in a room she once knew; unaware of the creatures that lurk in the darkness or of what goes bump in the night.

She's just aware of the soft hand brushing across her cheek. She knows she's half asleep and she knows this could all be a dream but the beautiful current jolting through her body at the touch is more than _real_.

It could be a murderer, it could be a paedophile, it could be a robber.

It could be worse, but she can't bring herself to panic, or to slip open her lids to reveal the identity of that touch against her cheek.

Whatever it is, it gives her a feeling she hasn't felt in a long time. She can't seem to describe it as it rests in the pit of her stomach, just that she's never been more safe, never been more at peace, never been more at _love_.

Elena finally does open her eyes, when the sunlight filters blindingly through her curtains. And she sits up groggily, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. The feeling still sits in her stomach, heavy and permanent. She can't seem to shake it.

She drags herself out of the warmth and security of her bed and straight to the bathroom, peeling off her shirt and dropping it to the floor. Her eyes lock onto the reflection in her mirror and she notices in the background behind her an _open_ window. Her heart skips a beat. She swears she locked it last night because it was cold and chilly out. She _knows_ she locked it last night.

It takes her a while to forget about the open window, it's still swirling in her mind as she pads into the bathroom.

Moments later, as the beating sound of shower water hits the floor a crow caws. It perches on a branch just outside Elena's room.

And as it flaps its wings ready to fly away you can almost see a flicker of a smirk in its eyes.

_Come on, come out, come here, come here._


End file.
